The ventilation system is smaller than you’d expect. Both insofar as your combat-crawl journey has taken only a few minutes of the many you’d set aside, and that the frigid metal tunnels embrace your every jolting move as if pleading that you stay for just a single moment more. Every corner traversed has forced the barrel of the pistol, holstered at your waist, further into the soft, and rapidly bruising, skin of your torso. It’s unsettling, here, to say the least.
Slatted beams of light interrupt the darkness and your musings in equal measure – that is to say, in disconcerting incompleteness. The thoughts still hum around your mind, but corrupted somehow. Defective. This isn’t her, Tristan. This isn’t Eury.
You align the muzzle of your gun with the gap of the vent cover. It fits perfectly. This isn’t her. You owe her nothing.
No. You have no qualms with extermination. But you need the evidence first. Suspicion, at the very least. Pistol re-holstered, you press your eye against the metal. You fail to supress the flinch upon seeing her.
Bolt upright on a gurney stained every goddamn colour of human suffering, limbs twitching, the caricature of a seizing, rabid creature, sits Lottie. Your eyes cast over her skin, mottled and lesioned and sloughing, and in a moment of weakness, and audible gag threatens to give your position away.
But it doesn’t. She’s distracted by something, someone. A figure, approaching, head bowed and arm extended. Words are uttered, a conversation. There is a gentleness in that voice, and that gentleness, with just those few words, hardens your resolve. She’s bloody, she’s playing at frightened, but she’s leaning forwards and you know what will happen because you’ve seen it before you know you cannot trust them and the kind are the first to go and you raise the gun once more, safety pulled back and you position and you aim and you-
Freeze. You freeze. For just one moment, you swear her eyes meet your own. And she smiles. The quirk of the lip, barely noticeable. The quiver, as it holds. The dimple. Her dimple. And, for just a moment, she’s there, in front of you, again. Arms outstretched, yearning, calling, screaming, wailing, begging you to shoot. You jerk back. Bile fills your throat.
And then she’s up, she’s moving, and Strangeness is guiding her by the hand to the door of the infirmary. They step through. You lose sight.
That’s when you hear the gunshot.